2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry announced: 2 scientists win the prize

China News Service, October 7 (Guan Na) On October 7, local time, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to two scientists. The prize is awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their discoveries of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.

The road to success for “ordinary people”

"Chemistry is the most important subject in Alfred Nobel's scientific research work." The official website of the Nobel Prize introduces the Chemistry Prize.

This emphasis on chemistry stems from the personal experience of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prize. As a chemist, he invented nitroglycerin dynamite. According to his will, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is intended to recognize those who have made significant discoveries and achieved significant results in the field of chemistry.

From 1901 to 2025, a total of 200 scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Among them, only two people have won this award twice: British biochemist Frederic Sanger and American chemist Carl Barry Sharpless, achieving a rare "twice" in the history of the Nobel Prize.

The first person to win two chemistry prizes was Sanger, known as the "Father of Genetics." Sanger was born in Gloucestershire, England in 1918 and graduated from Cambridge University. His father was a doctor and had a profound influence on him.

Sanger completely sequenced the amino acid sequence of insulin, proving that the protein has a clear structure, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958. In the 1970s, he proposed the "dideoxy termination method", also known as the "Sanger method", a technology for rapid determination of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences. In 1980, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two other scientists.

Industry evaluation said that the two technologies invented by Sanger opened the door to the fields of molecular biology, genetics and genomics research.

Faced with all kinds of praise, Sanger said humbly: "I am just an ordinary person who messes around in the laboratory all day."

Sanger also attributes his success to his wife and other researchers. When he won the Nobel Prize for the second time, he said that research in the field of nucleic acids was not completed by myself, but benefited from the help of many outstanding collaborators.

Talking about his wife Margaret, he said, "Although she is not a scientist, she provided me with a peaceful and happy family and made the greatest contribution to my scientific research work."

On November 19, 2013, Sanger passed away peacefully in his sleep at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridgeshire, England, at the age of 95. Although Sanger's life has come to an end, the research path opened up by him is still moving forward in countless laboratories.

Love first: embrace interest and passion

“Embrace your interests and passions and go all out!” Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Jennifer Dowdner once said this to her younger generations.

Pure love and sincere interest in science are the core driving force for countless scientific researchers to delve into their fields and make breakthroughs and innovations. This has been perfectly confirmed by the scientific research journey of many Nobel Prize winners in chemistry.

In 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Dodna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to gene editing technology.

In an interview in 2021, Jennifer Downer recalled her scientific research path and said, "When I came into contact with biochemistry, I felt that this is what I really wanted to do. I wanted to study the chemistry of living organisms. I started this journey of exploration in college and have never regretted it."

Coincidentally, most of the scientific researchers who have won the Nobel Prize for their breakthrough innovations in the field of chemistry started out of pure love.

In 2022, Caroline Bertozzi, Morten Meirdahl and Karl Barry Sharpless won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Caroline Bertozzi's life trajectory was quietly rewritten by chemistry. Talking about her original intention in scientific research, she once admitted that she took an organic chemistry course in college, which changed her life, "I fell in love with this subject all of a sudden. I will never forget the feeling when I found the subject that I really loved. I am eager to learn more and study, not because I care about grades, but because I really like this subject."

Carl Barry Sharpless, who also won the award, also emphasized interest in his advice to young people: "You must maintain interest. As long as you are truly interested in something, even if you are exhausted, you are willing to continue to study for it. Only when you are interested can you truly invest. Inspiration will appear when you continue to expand your knowledge."

Looking at the growth and scientific research paths of many Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, it is not difficult to find that top scientific research achievements are never the result of utilitarian pursuit, but the gift of love and persistence.

Achievements of winners in the past ten years

From 1901 to 2025, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded 117 times. Here is a list of the winners from the last ten years and their major achievements:

2025: Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi received the award in recognition of their contributions to the development of metal-organic frameworks.

2024: David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jungper received the award "for cracking the code of protein structure."

2023: Mongi Bavandi, Louis Bruce and Alexei Yekimov were awarded for their contributions to the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

2022: Caroline Bertozzi, Morten Meirdahl and Carl Barry Sharpless, for their contributions to click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

2021: David Macmillan and Benjamin Lister were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for advances in the study of asymmetric organocatalysis."

2020: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Dowdner received the award in recognition of their contributions to gene editing technology.

2019: John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the research and development of lithium batteries.

2018: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Francis Arnold, George Smith, and Gregory Winter for their achievements in the directed evolution of enzymes and phage display technology for peptides and antibodies.

2017: Joachim Frank, Richard Henderson, and Jacques Dubochet developed cryo-electron microscopy technology to determine the structure of biomolecules in solution with very high resolution.

2016: Three scientists, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Ferlinga, won the prize "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines".